


Why Should I

by WritestuffLee



Category: Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: Angst, Gen, Songfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2003-09-02
Updated: 2003-09-02
Packaged: 2017-12-12 06:39:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,508
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/808467
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WritestuffLee/pseuds/WritestuffLee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Obi-Wan finds his feelings about his master's death are more ambivalent than he expected.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Why Should I

**Author's Note:**

> Lyrics to "Why Should I Cry for You?" © Copyright Sting 1991

_ _

_Under the dog star sail,_   
_Over the reefs of moonshine,_   
_Under the skies of fall,_   
_North northwest, the stones of Faroe._

Obi-Wan had always thought of the Force as a sort of all-encompassing ocean, all of them sensitive to different currents, but filled and surrounded by it, like the ocean’s salt water in their individual cells. Qui-Gon had moved through the currents of the Living Force, and Obi-Wan through the Unifying Force, complementing each other in their time together as a training pair. They had been a team, a partnership, a balanced whole.

Now Qui-Gon was dead, and Obi-Wan felt . . .

He didn’t know what he felt. There was a strange sense of dislocation and disbelief. He expected to hear his master’s voice at any moment, to sense his presence in the hallway or elsewhere reaching out through their bond to check on him. Instead, there was this cold void where there had once been warmth. But that had begun to form before the man was dead.

_Under the Arctic fire,_   
_Over the seas of silence,_   
_Hauling on frozen ropes_   
_for all my days remaining._   
_But would north be true?_

The words started to coalesce in his mind as he watched the flames take his master’s body. Qui-Gon Jinn was dead. The man he had spent the last 12 years of his life with. The man who had taught him, cajoled him, driven him, argued with him, punished him, touched him, healed him, loved him, shaped him. Made him. Gone. And he felt lost and rudderless.

The Council said he was a knight now, that by virtue of his defeating the creature that had killed his master, he was fit to call himself a Jedi Knight. What did that make Qui-Gon then, besides dead? A failure somehow? A fool, certainly, running after the Sith without his teammate. The thing had nearly beaten him on Tatooine, and left him so winded he’d been unable to stand. What had possessed him to rush after it alone? Had Qui-Gon been protecting him? Or had he simply been a fool? Whatever the reason, he’d paid for that foolishness with his life, leaving behind a new-minted knight saddled with a padawan before he’d gotten his own feet under him.

_All colors bleed to red_   
_Asleep on the ocean’s bed._   
_Drifting in empty seas_   
_For all my days remaining._

It was like being shipwrecked, he thought, watching the flames, smelling cloth and flesh and woodsmoke in the wind. The captain was dead, the crew drowned, and here he was cast up on a new, strange shore with the responsibility for the life of someone he barely knew. He wondered if Qui-Gon had truly thought he’d been ready for his trials, or if he’d said that only for the sake of expediency. There’d been no time to find out. Regardless, the Council seemed to think so, and he would keep his promise to his master, no matter what it cost him, or how difficult it would be.

And he knew it would be difficult. At the moment it seemed impossible. He didn’t feel ready and it didn’t feel quite real yet. There’d been no ceremony, simply the decision from the Council. Yoda had cut his padawan braid, and later that night, Obi-Wan had shaved off his short cauda. Even now, he felt himself reaching for his own braid periodically, remembering how Qui-Gon sometimes had given it a tug in affection or annoyance, more often the former—reminding himself of all that had gone unspoken between them these last years. And then he felt regret.

_But would north be true?_   
_Why should I?_   
_Why should I cry for you?_

In the beginning, he had been desperate for Qui-Gon’s attention, then grateful for it, then simply comfortable and comforted. Then, some time near his seventeenth birthday, there’d been a subtle change. He’d found himself leaning into the brief touches, wanting more. At first he’d passed it off as a crush, but it had grown instead of diminishing, over the years, grown into something warm and deep, something underlying their day to day relationship like bedrock.

Neither of them had spoken of it, or felt the need to. It was just there, waiting for a time when it was possible to pursue it more fully. As Qui-Gon’s padawan, he knew it was not wise to act on his feelings yet. So he had hoarded them, and lived on touches and glances and silent promises of a moment that never came. Not only had that moment never come, it had never been mentioned. Qui-Gon’s last words had been not of his present padawan, but of the one he had set Obi-Wan aside for in front of the Council.

In that ill-considered moment, everything Obi-Wan had felt for Qui-Gon Jinn had turned to ashes in his heart. By the time his former master’s body was given to the flames, what he had thought they’d had was as cold and dead as the man he’d once loved. So there was no grief in his heart. But there was anger.

_Dark angels follow me_   
_Over a godless sea_   
_Mountains of endless falling,_   
_For all my days remaining._

Had Qui-Gon ever loved him, he wondered? Had he ever loved anyone? Was he capable of it? In all their years together, he’d never seen his master with a lover, not really. He’d claimed to love Knight Tahl, had apparently been devastated by her death. But they had never really been lovers, and there was no one else that Obi-Wan knew of, not even through the rumor mill. Perhaps that explained his failure with Xanatos, as well. Did Qui-Gon Jinn know how to love anyone?

_What would be true?_

Did it matter?

The flames burned higher and hotter, cloth vanishing, flesh blackening and shriveling, the stink of burning hair in the wind. Yoda, Mace and the others watched silently, as silently as Obi-Wan, as the shell of the man who had been a master swordsman and diplomat was reduced to a few handsful of basic chemical compounds. Anakin, despite himself, nestled up to him, clutched at his hand. Obi-Wan felt nothing, but closed his fingers around the boy’s, squeezing gently, reassuringly. There was no point in punishing the boy for coming between them. It had been Qui-Gon who had placed him there, not Anakin who had thrust himself into this situation. He was a child, afraid and alone, and the man who had promised to take care of him had abandoned him to the care of people who didn’t trust him for reasons he didn’t understand. Almost, Obi-Wan could feel sorry for him.

He watched blankly as the body was consumed, wanting to feel something but completely unable to. Flames and smoke bled together against the darkness, obscuring everything but the pyre and the small circle of mourners. His heart was on that pyre too, all his hope and happiness, perhaps even his future, flames eating away at everything he thought he knew. The words trickled into Obi-Wan’s mind one after the other, forming thoughts and phrases and sentences, forming finally, a kind of poem, a dirge, an elegy of sorts, though it was more for his own heart than for the dead man, for what had been killed by a few harsh words, a careless declaration.

_Sometimes I see your face,_   
_The stars seem to lose their place._   
_Why must I think of you?_   
_Why must I?_   
_Why should I?_   
_Why should I cry for you?_   
_Why would you want me to?_   
_And what would it mean to say,_   
_That I loved you in my fashion?_

When he looked up again, the fire was cold and he was alone. He felt himself sliding down the wall until he was squatting against it, his hood fallen over his head, face buried in his hands. He wanted to cry and couldn’t. He wanted to scream and rail and rant and shout and swear, but that was not allowed. He was a Jedi Knight, and he had a padawan. His master was dead and he was the master now. Everything had changed.

_What would be true?_

The wind came up as he sat against the stone wall, cutting across the rooftops of Theed’s palace and sweeping into the little arched enclosure at the top of the Tower of Sorrows, blowing the last of the smoke from the pyre, lifting the lightest of the ashes away to scatter across the courtyard below. What was left of Qui-Gon’s body was dissipating into the physical world as his spirit had into the Force. Rains would wash the rest of it away, eventually. Soon there would be nothing at all.

_Why should I?  
Why should I cry for you?_

Obi-Wan struggled to his feet and pulled his cloak around him, then walked the long spiral of stairs down to the ground, Qui-Gon’s ashes still swirling around him.

There was only the future now. The past was dead. All of it. The moments stretched before him, one after the other.

Empty.

Empty.

Empty.


End file.
